In my experience as a counsellor and hypnotherapist, chronic pain patients are amongst the most difficult population to work with. This is understandable given the constant emotional and physical suffering they endure.

With chronic pain, usually earlier attachment traumas and emotional wounds which had not been available to conscious awareness, suddenly become amplified and thus these individuals become very frustrated and angry with themselves, and just about everybody in the life. This idoess not exclude people such as carers and therapists who are trying to help them as much as possible.

Part of the anger can arise from having an impossible wish and desire to have somebody else fix them or get rid of their pain. But part of that lesson, although extremely difficult, is arriving at a point in which one accepts that they are going to have to live with their pain and instead of going from specialist to specialist they have to learn to be with their pain and manage the pain. This facing of reality can be so freeing because suffering can reduce enormously, if we accept that suffering is pain plus resistance, and when resisting/fearing/hating the pain stops, so can suffering. The pain itself is then experienced like a raw burn, so to speak,

Often this realisation serves as a terrible gift. Terrible in the sense that it’s so excruciating which you would never wish on your worst enemy. But it is nonetheless a hard lesson in that it teaches them that their old ways of thinking, and living and avoiding feeling, which actually lead to enormous suffering if not even their actual pain condition, can be reversed.

Fortunately, mindfulness therapy combined with hypnotherapy and counselling are amongst the most effective ways to learn how to manage one’s relationship to pain by sitting with and being with the pain in a non-judgemental and accepting way so that all the fear and anxiety and anger associated with pain diminishes. Then sometimes the experience of pain itself diminishes. This can take a number of years of weekly sessions to accomplish.

Letting go of magical thinking and working towards realistic therapeutic goals can and often does become profoundly healing for chronic pain patients when they have an empathically oriented psychotherapist, hypnotherapist and counsellor. It is important to have one therapist who is trained in both Eastern and Western counselling methods. Otherwise, seeing different therapists with different philosophical orientations can actually confuse issues and blur and make matters worse.

If you’re in the Brighton Melbourne area, help is really available. But if you can’t get to brighton for counselling and want to work remotely to manage your chronic pain, online counselling is available, via Skype.